Amazon is opening a data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, its first in South America. The facility will provide the region with quicker access to the company’s Amazon Web Services, an “infrastructure cloud” that serves up various computing resources, including processing power and storage.

Amazon data centers already serve four regions in the U.S. and three others in Europe and Asia. AWS can be accessed from anywhere, but it helps to have a data center in your backyard. This reduces the number of failures on your path to the data center and lowers latency. You can also spread your applications...